Championing The Power Of The Press

Given the political climate, it makes sense that The Post is being released now. Art is often a reflection of national consciousness. Our movies reveal what we, as a people, are thinking far more than most people realize.

Right now, the news media is facing a time of persecution. It can be argued that the charged attitude towards the Fourth Estate is one of their own making, borne out of the popularity of entertainment journalism and the twenty-four-hour news cycle.

There has long been an insistence that journalists in this country are biased against conservatives, which in turn caused a massive overcorrection in the form of Fox News.

These thoughts have come to a head in the past year, with the current occupant of the White House calling many mainstream news organizations the enemy of the American people and regularly attacking them at every turn.

Given that the president lies about most things, these assertions can be dismissed out of hand. Politicians and journalists have long had an uneasy relationship—a symbiosis necessary for both policy promotion and newspaper sales. It can be sometimes friendly, sometimes adversarial. Friendless only exists to a point, though.

Any journalist too friendly with a politician runs the risk of losing credibility. The news exists to inform the public and protect them from the people they elected, lest those they elected become to self-interested. These ideas are the forefront of The Post, an excellent addition to the Spielberg filmography.

The Post tells the story of a scrappy, local, and family owned newspaper known as The Washington Post. Before Jeff Bezos, before Democracy Dies in Darkness, on the cusp of the scandal that would bring down a president, Katherine Graham was the owner and publisher of the newspaper.

The Washington Post has long been thought of as the kid brother of The New York Times. Graham’s tenure came on the heels of her husband’s death by suicide, thrusting her into a position she wasn’t prepared for and likely never quite wanted. She was tasked with maintaining the paper her father owned for posterity and prestige.

Portrayed by Meryl Streep with a kind of nervous strength, The Post tells the story of a tense moment in American history. Daniel Ellsburg, a whistling blowing Marine turned analyst, has turned over pages from a damning study on the Vietnam War to The New York Times, a study that, among other things, shows that the U.S. has long known that the war was unwinnable but continued the conflict to avoid embarrassment on the world stage.

Richard Nixon orders an injunction on the NYT, forbidding them from publishing further information by claiming that doing so would damage the U.S. and constitutes treason. Ellsburg then leaks the same information to the Post. Editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) insists the paper publish, despite everyone involved facing serious consequences if the courts don’t decide in favor of the freedom of the press.

The film is tense and uplifting, painting reporters and journalists as guardians of democracy. Of course, there is no more competent director than Steven Spielberg and no more consistent actors than Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks. The film was always going to be well made. The question becomes then: is the film consequential?

It certainly portrays a moment in history as gripping and weighty. Spielberg isn’t as heavy handed as he might have been, although there’s no love lost for Nixon and his administration, shown as shadowy and evil, authoritarian in every sense of the word. Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) has some especially harrowing words describing him in one highly effective scene.

Still, the film doesn’t quite rise above a good vs. evil tale. Its lessons are learned but it doesn’t argue that they need to be regularly revisited.

Maybe that’s a lesson for today’s journalists and tomorrow’s movies. There will be plenty of fodder for Hollywood drama to come out of the current administration, maybe even more for farce and comedy.

As we’re watching it unfold, it seems like a time period we’d all be eager to forget. Twitter is unlikely to let us.

Maybe I’m optimistic, but I think there’s plenty of integrity left at places like The Washington Post and The New York Times. Spielberg thinks so too. We’ll just have to wait and see if we’re right.